Evil in the History of Philosophy

We can only skim the surface of this vast subject by pointing to how some major thinkers have treated evil. Humankind has tried to make sense of and address evil from the dawn of history and likely long before that. Over a thousand years before the Greek philosophers, there was the Babylonian Code of Hammurabi, which contained 282 statutes, a sophisticated body of laws. From the Jews came the Ten Commandments, which also existed at roughly the same time. The first four commandments concern our relationship with God and the last six how we are to relate to other people.

In the centuries following Jesus, Christian philosophers worked to make sense of evil and how to reconcile its existence with a benevolent and all-powerful God. Irenaus, who lived in the second century, suggested that evil is necessary for human moral development. God, he believed, gave us free will, which to be meaningful must include the possibility, indeed the inevitability, of suffering. His ideas continue to be expressed by philosophers and theologians. Three centuries later, Augustine, who was influenced by Neo-Platonists, argued that evil had no existence in itself. Since God creates only what is good, evil is the absence or corruption of what is good.

Skipping down to the fifteenth-century Renaissance, debate still exists about whether what Machiavelli wrote in The Prince was prescriptive or descriptive. Did he merely describe how successful rulers act, or was he advising them to behave ruthlessly? If the latter, he defined evil out of existence in favor of expediency, political pragmatism, that leaves no room for ethical debate. To Machiavelli, who was no friend of Christianity and perhaps anticipated Nietzsche, the greatest evil was weakness in a leader.

Bayle, the son of a pastor and a philosopher few people today have even heard of, believed there was no reasoned solution to the problem of evil. Nor did he seem to offer a way to combat it. Voltaire, who initially refused to turn against God, concluded after the 1755 devastating earthquake in Lisbon that trying to reconcile natural evil with Christianity was absurd. If there was to be any remedy to the problem of moral evil, he suggested, it would come about through human enlightenment.

Voltaire vigorously attacked the earlier suggestion by the mathematician Leibniz that we live in the best of all possible worlds. Leibniz argued that because God is all-good and all-powerful, God could have created an infinite number of possible worlds, but because he chose to create the one we have, it must be the best. We will eventually understand, thought Leibniz, how the existence of evil makes sense. Some have suggested Leibniz came close to denying the nature of evil.

Rousseau opposed any attempt to argue that someday evil will turn out to have been in the service of good. He recognized its ugly and destructive nature and so labeled it for what it is. Rousseau believed evil could be overcome through knowledge and that this would result from the right type of education. He therefore anticipated remedies that imply the inevitability of human progress.

Hume, like Bayle, mistrusted reason as a way to make sense of evil. He believed natural and moral evil made the existence of a good and powerful God unlikely. Hume acknowledged that evil was not inconsistent with faith, but insisted that faith cannot be reasoned to from observations of nature. Hume seems not to have offered a remedy for moral evil, although it is clear that he believed careful reasoning would move us in the right direction.

Kant argued that evil has the potential to plunge us into despair. He believed we will never make sense of evil in relation to the nature of God, and in fact that trying to do so was immoral. Kant offered a solution to moral evil that he viewed as grounded in logic. Although there are several forms of his categorical imperative, they all turn on acting as if the principle by which you act were to become a universal law. There has been debate about the extent to which this resembles the golden rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

Hegel argued that it was a mistake sharply to distinguish between divine and human nature, and it seems clear that his idea of God did not align with the Christian one. Humanity, according to Hegel, is responsible for evil, but God’s will prevails in history, which will eventually turn out as it should. He saw this process as inevitable, the result of actions, counteractions, and resulting syntheses.

Schopenhauer was cynical by nature and viewed the world as anything but rational. People are motivated by the desire to dominate, and what he called will was the ultimate ruler. His view of the world has bleak and pessimistic. Hope for Schopenhauer was a delusion. Yet, curiously, he believed there would be something resembling ultimate justice. His solutions to evil were psychological. It is our responsibility to learn how to live in the face of it.

Marx, the ultimate atheist, focused only on moral, as opposed to natural, evil. Only the eventual destruction of capitalism and its evils would overcome it. Revolution was therefore necessary, and through it the worker will eventually reconnect with what he or she produces. Underlying Marx’s thought is the thesis that the redistribution of wealth will right society’s wrongs. Even a quick look at Communist Russia should call this into question.

In his lifetime, Nietzsche was either ignored or viewed as a lunatic. But that has changed. Nietzsche was the consummate iconoclast. He argued that the Superior Person, the Overman, would and should create and therefore define morality. Only weakness is evil, which as traditionally defined, say by Christianity, is not evil at all. Like others before and after him, Nietzsche redefined evil.

Mention must also be made of the Marquis de Sade. It is from him that we get the term sadism. Sade was the supreme rebel and extremist, who was incarcerated for a good part of his life in psychiatric institutions. His appeal to some readers even today is his unstinting endorsement of every imaginable form of perversion, and to him the only evil was self-restraint. Sade was the personification of the taste for forbidden fruit.

Some writers mistakenly believe that, because of his understanding of the human mind, Freud was neutral about evil. That is not so. He repeatedly expressed that, regardless of the psychological reasons for criminal behavior, society would not be well advised to release antisocial criminals from prison to prey on more victims. Although he certainly recognized the nature of unconscious process, Freud never appealed to it as an excuse for evil behavior.